Fix Samus' Insta-Death: How to Replace the Save State Battery in Super Metroid

In this video, we try to fix a co-worker's copy of Super Metroid that won't let her start a new game.

With Super Nintendo game collecting at an all-time high one issue that some may run into is having save state batteries that are starting to fail. I mean, these batteries are 25+ years old, they are bound to wear out.

One of my co-workers had a copy of Super Metroid that, when she tried to start a new game, Samus would instantly die at the top of the screen. I bounced some ideas off of John Riggs as he's amazing at diagnosing games that won't start. One of the ideas I came up with, in talking with John, was deleting a save state and see if the game would start from scratch. It did, but once I removed power I had the same issue again. This underscored the fact that it was likely a battery issue.

Not only did I want to swap the battery, which I knew would be easy, but I wanted to try to save the data on the cartridge. I thought I could possibly create a lifeline with 2 leads from the battery to the tabs on the cartridge board to provide power for the save state. Not knowing if this would work or not I also dumped the save data to my Retro 5, just-in-case.

Initially, getting the new CR-2032 battery prepped was pretty easy. I used some 28-gauge wire to connect the positive and negative terminals of the battery to the bottom of the cartridge PCB. Getting the spot welded tabs off, however, was a royal pain in the rear end. Not being able to hold the battery with pliers made getting everything lined up challenging. On top of that soldering to the negative terminal on the underside of the cart was a major challenge. In-fact when trying to clean up my soldering I actually disconnected the battery from the tabs and life-support wire. This meant that my only possibility for saving the data was my Retron 5, which hasn't proven very good at dumping and restoring save state data to this point.

After I got everything soldered and cleaned up I put the cartridge in my Retron 5 and, surprisingly, the save data was there. Or was it? It was actually on the Retron 5 as when I put the cart in my Gamerz Tek Super HD-2 the save state data was gone. Crud.

I put the cartridge back in my Retron 5 and tried to transfer the save state data back to the cartridge. It initially looked like everything transferred properly and, when I put the cart in my Super HD-2, the files were all there! I wiped one of the corrupted data files to start new and it worked great!

At the end of the day, if I had more confidence in the Retron 5 restoring the backed up data I wouldn't have gone through all these steps. I would have ordered a tabbed battery and just replaced it and not worried about the lifelines. Seriously, I didn't need to do this and only created more work for myself. However, if I didn't have the Retron 5 (and wasn't stupid and disconnected the lifeline accidentally) this would have been the only way to save Megan's Backup Data.

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The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.
(Pub. L. 94–553, title I, § 101, Oct. 19, 1976, 90 Stat. 2546; Pub. L. 101–650, title VI, § 607, Dec. 1, 1990, 104 Stat. 5132; Pub. L. 102–492, Oct. 24, 1992, 106 Stat. 3145.)